1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of automated classification of items of, for example, an electronic catalog into categories based on a knowledge base. More particularly, the invention relates to classifying an item utilizing cascading search methodologies on selected sets of data from one or more databases.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the creation of an electronic catalog, content is typically received in an unclassified form or a form which is classified differently than is desired. For example, if a uniform schema of classification is to be used for content that is obtained from many different sources, the content must be reclassified to be consistent with the uniform schema. Typically, classifying new content requires an individual familiar both with the subject matter of the new content and the classification schema into which the material is to be classified. The process of manually classifying a large catalog of new items is time consuming and expensive. As a result, many electronic catalogs contain multiple and inconsistent classification schemas within the single catalog. This makes it more difficult to find items and to compare different items which may be classified into different categories.
For large groups of documents, classification systems have been developed which analyze the text of the documents to try to connect documents that have similar text. Various different complex schemas have been employed so that documents are not grouped together simply because they contain the same words. The classification systems have been developed to group documents together that have similar topics. Nevertheless, the precision and accuracy required in grouping similar documents together is not as high as that required in grouping items together to create an electronic catalog when that catalog is to use a single classification system for content from many different sources.